🚀 go-pugleaf

As we prepare to get on the internet, we are considering also considering
the issue of alum access.  The alumni association wishes to keep in contact
with as many individuals as possible, and is attempting to find out how many
of our alumni have some form of e-mail access, and how many would use it for
contacts.

Our previous system was a Data General MV/10000, and we did provide limited
resources to alums.  Accounts were limited with respect to disk space, and
ran at a lower priority than regular student accounts.  Major concerns were
commercial usage - strictly prohibited by state regulations - and 
recreational usage (games :-) interfering with academic usage.  Since the
machine was not connected to external networks, it had few other attractions.

The solution was not entirely satisfactory, and few people used it on a
regular basis.  One interesting item - people who had used the previous
computer system (an HP-2000) did not transition well to the DG.  This is
most likely a common problem - supporting remote users who rarely, if ever,
come into the computer center, when major system changes occur.

I'm a bit envious of those of you who say "Give the Alumni Association
a spare workstation."  At this time, we have one workstation for our
Internet connection, and several AT&T 3B2's for DOS networking and UNIX
classroom support.  Quite frankly, the UNIX environment has not been
particularly popular here, in a liberal arts environment,  and it's
difficult to generate support for resources used by a very small fraction
of the community.  

My personal inclination is to observe resource utilization for a quarter
or two, and then offer alum access.  I expect this to require a bit of
a selling job with management :-)

Has anyone had any really negative experiences, or problems, such as
administrative overhead, support headaches, etc.?  

Joe Pollock      The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA
pollock@u.washington.edu